“I want the presence of God Himself, or I don’t want anything at all to do with religion . . . I want all that God has or I don’t want any.”

Quit trying and start trusting—that is the call of faith. Quit trying to do it your way and start trusting in God’s way. Trust that he knows what is good for you. Be obedient whether you understand it all, be obedient whether you like it all, be obedient because he is Lord. Otherwise, to proclaim with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord is to be confessing a lie, insofar as you are concerned. He is Lord, whether you acknowledge him as Lord or not. However, what it means here to confess Jesus as Lord is to confess that Jesus Christ is your Lord. These are the principles of faith.

Paul has been outlining a fair consideration of Christ. Next, he calls us to a frank confession of Christ.

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”— For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord—invoking Him as Lord—will be saved (Romans 10:10-11)

The believing heart results in righteousness and the confessing mouth results in salvation. This is the confession that we make of Christ. One of the things this confession of Christ does is gives us a personal expression of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It means that with our hearts we come to faith in Christ. That is where we experience the new birth. That comes first. Then something else must follow—an outward expression of that faith. It is not enough to be an inward Christian. You must be a Christian inside and out. Not only must you believe in your heart, but you must confess with your mouth the Lordship of Christ. Confession gives you an avenue of personal expression for your faith in Christ. You do that by positioning yourself before others as a believer in Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “If you won’t confess me before men, I won’t confess you before my Father who is in heaven.” So . . . we believe in a public confession of faith. When we immerse people in the baptismal pool, they are making a public confession of their faith in Jesus Christ. The reason we baptize after they believe is that it is meaningless to make a public confession of faith in Christ unless you have that faith in Jesus Christ. The New Testament principle is, “Repent and be baptized.” And everyone who is baptized is giving public testimony to the faith they already have. So, confession is not only a personal expression of our personal faith in Christ, but it gives a public exposure of the Lordship of Christ to the world.